How to use the team time zone view
Build the roster once. Search a city for each person, correct the name, and set the hours they actually work rather than the hours in their contract. Someone who starts at 07:30 to be home for the school run has a different overlap than the default nine to five, and the bar is only as useful as the hours you put in it.
- Read every bar against the ruler at the top, which is your own clock. A band that starts three columns to the left of yours means that person is three hours ahead of your morning.
- Look at the bottom band before you book anything. It marks the minutes when every person on the roster is inside their own working day.
- If the bottom band is empty, say so out loud instead of picking a time and hoping. Somebody is going to take that call outside their day, and it should be a decision rather than an accident.
- Press Copy team link and paste it in the channel. Whoever opens it sees the same roster on their own clock, which is usually the fastest way to end a thread about what time works.
Why the bars move on their own
Offsets are computed from the real time zone rules in your browser, not from a fixed number of hours. When the United States changes clocks two weeks before Europe does, the bands shift for that fortnight and the overlap changes with them. That gap is the single most common cause of a missed call in March and October, and the view shows it instead of hiding it.
Picking a time when nothing overlaps
Teams spread across more than about nine hours of longitude often have no shared working hour at all. The usual answers are to rotate which zone takes the awkward slot week by week, to keep one short call and move everything else to writing, or to accept a standing thirty minute overlap at the edge of two days and protect it. All three work. Pretending an overlap exists does not.